Comeback

Lance Armstrong Rides Again

Lance Armstrong, photographed by Annie Leibovitz for the December 1999 issue of Vanity Fair.

In a VF.com exclusive, indefatigable anti-cancer crusader and seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong opens up about doping, dating, politics (including a possible run for the Texas statehouse), George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, the French, the next phase in his war on a global epidemic, and why he’s decided to try for an eighth Tour title—at age 37.

Lance Armstrong greeted me at the front door, barefoot, holding a glass of Cabernet. Though we’re neighbors among the rolling hills of Austin, Texas, we’re not especially close. Occasionally we bump into each other around town and talk about politics. We are, in other words, acquaintances. So when he invited me to dinner in mid-August—at my instigation—my plan was to discuss the Olympics and his future in Texas politics. Armstrong insisted he had something important he wanted to tell me in confidence.

Since I know Armstrong’s disdain for small talk, I was somewhat taken aback when the world’s top anti-cancer advocate (and seven-time winner of cycling’s premier race, the Tour de France) immediately launched into a diatribe about recent charges in the press—first printed in our local paper, the Austin American-Statesman—that he was the single largest consumer of water in town, with most of his habit (222,900 gallons in June alone) going to maintain the greenery around his three-acre estate. He complained that the paper had invaded his privacy zone by splashing across its front page an aerial photo of his Spanish colonial mansion, all 8,000 square feet of it.

“That bothered me, ’cause it’s my home,” he said, offering up tuna-tartare hors d’oeuvres and pouring generously from an uncorked wine bottle. (In collaboration with a friend, Armstrong has his own boutique label.) In Austin, the eco-capital of Texas, residents tend to favor native plants and wildflowers to the sculpted lawns of the Palm Springs variety. So even though I knew Armstrong to be a fierce competitor, I realized that he’d be riled by winning the “water hog” title. Especially when the item was picked up by the newswires and the blogs.

“It’s where my kids roll around in the grass,” he told me, “and swim in their pools and throw their footballs and kick their soccer balls.” (His ex-wife, Kristin Armstrong, with whom he has remained quite close since their 2003 divorce, lives only a few miles away, so he spends a lot of time with their children, eight-year-old Luke, and Grace and Bella, their six-year-old twins. Armstrong’s actually one of the best hands-on fathers I’ve ever met.) He told me he considered the photo and the article “an invasion. It bothers you when it runs in The New York Times and every paper across the United States. I was in Santa Barbara for the summer, and it ran in that local paper. I was thinking, Oh my God. But it gets back to politics. I mean, I think from the mind of Texas media they’re already thinking, This guy’s planning something political. And so they’ll look at your voting record, they’ll look at your water bill. If you get into a fight at a bar with a bouncer, they’ll write it.”

But surely he hadn’t asked me to dinner to talk about his plumbing. I began to wonder if, instead, he’d wanted to confide in me—as a historian and a journalist—about his purported plans to run for governor. Word had it that he’d been making the public-appearance rounds and setting his sights on 2010. He has Dallas roots and a ranch in Dripping Springs. While many in Texas have pegged Armstrong as a Republican (one of his advisers is Austin’s Mark McKinnon, who has helped burnish the images of both George W. Bush and John McCain), he nonetheless seeks the counsel of John Kerry and has decidedly Democratic leanings.

“What about the rumors,” I asked him, “that you’ll run for governor?”

He answered slyly, “Down the road, something like that might be possible. Probably in 2014.”

My host, who has an interior designer’s eye, gave me a quick tour. He’s created a home that is immense and fluid, with beautiful dark woods and shades of maroon. The spread, while spectacular, has something of a playground feel: wheeled toys are scattered about as if in Legoland. Here and there, the walls are dominated by museum-quality canvases by Ed Ruscha, colorful minimalist pieces bearing concise slogans—pure and direct and in your face, like Armstrong himself. A few years ago, he said, he’d had a chance encounter with the painter whose work he’d been collecting.

While dining at Chef Melba’s in Hermosa Beach, California, Armstrong heard an obnoxious voice, with a thick New Jersey accent, coming from the table behind him: “Hey, kid, what are you gonna do for work this summa?!” Armstrong worried that he had a kook on his hands. “I’m talkin’ to you, kid. What are you gonna do?” Armstrong got pissed, he recalled. “I was like … I think this motherfucker’s talkin’ to me. So I wheeled around in my chair. It was fucking Don Rickles. And I started laughing. Anyway, he’s like, ‘Meet my friend Ed.’

“And I go, ‘Hey, Ed. I’m Lance Armstrong.’ And he goes, ‘I’m Ed Ruscha.’ And I’m like, ‘Ed Ruscha?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ It was fucking crazy. My main guy was having dinner with Rickles. I told him about how much [his paintings] Speed Racer and Safe and Effective Medication have meant to me.”

We moved out to the back terrace, overlooking the surrounding grounds, the gardens, a designer pool nearby. Like a couple of back-fence neighbors, we pulled up lawn chairs to chew over the local news. Armstrong read aloud a retaliatory letter to the editor—a screed, in fact—that he’d drafted but never sent to the Statesman. I considered this a wise choice. He’d need the support of his hometown newspaper if he’d ever make a run for the statehouse. Furthermore, the editors had consistently promoted his Austin-based anti-cancer efforts, in glowing fashion, for more than a decade; it was best to cut them slack.

And the talk, as it always must with Lance Armstrong, turned to cancer.

Back in October 1996, after winning two Tour stages, he’d been diagnosed with an aggressive strain of testicular cancer. He had had two surgeries: one to remove a cancerous testicle, another to remove two cancerous lesions on the brain. An additional 8 to 10 golf-ball-size tumors were found in his lungs. He’d been a dead man walking. Seeking the best specialists, some of whom happened to be at Indiana University Medical Center, he underwent a round of B.E.P. chemotherapy (Bleomycin, Etoposide, and Platinol), followed by three rounds of V.I.P. chemotherapy (Ifosfamide, Etoposide, and Platinol). He was only 25 years old and had been given less than a 40 percent chance of survival. Victim Armstrong, however, fought the odds and won, going on to take an unprecedented seven straight cycling crowns. Once a year, now, he does blood tests, his levels normal, though the fears of remission always persist. It’s the same test that women use for pregnancy. “Back in ’96,” Armstrong likes to joke, “I was really, really pregnant!”

As I listened to him, my chief worry was that Armstrong’s cancer had returned. Could that be what this dinner was all about? Perhaps he wanted me to be his Boswell, to document his fight going forward. Though he’s among the most focused and tightly wound people I’ve ever encountered (and, paradoxically, one of the most unflaggingly upbeat), he seemed particularly intense that night. His lapis eyes seemed to smolder. He fidgeted with his BlackBerry, a skull emblazoned on its back. His restless hands bespoke surplus energy. (Lance and Kristin often text-message each other XXOO notes.)

My heart sank as I considered what he’d gone through: lost testicle, chemo, baldness; the struggles, the titles, then his choice to return to Austin and retire from racing for good.

I knew a bit of his history as an advocate for others who shared the disease. He’d started the Lance Armstrong Foundation (L.A.F.) in Austin in 1997, a little mom-and-pop organization. Over time, he understood that survivors were sometimes too afraid, psychologically, to talk about cancer, let alone spread the word. So, in 2003, he created LiveStrong, in effect an anti-cancer brand, designed to raise public awareness, largely through a Web site that could act as a gathering place for fellow survivors. Within a decade Armstrong had helped raise $265 million, his organization hosting bike-race fund-raisers across the country, creating survivorship programs, posting medical resource guides online. Like his friend Bono, Armstrong had redefined celebrity leveraging, becoming a regular 365-days-a-year walking-talking Jerry Lewis Telethon. (In Armstrong’s last appearance on the Forbes Celebrity 100, in 2005, his estimated annual income was $28 million, largely accrued through endorsements and support from companies such as Nike, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Trek Bicycles.)

President George W. Bush and Armstrong, right, take a ride on the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, August 20, 2005. By Paul Morse/the White House/A.P. Photo.

The real breakthrough had come in 2004. Nike came to him with the idea of having people wear plastic yellow LiveStrong wristbands—the color of the jersey worn by each day’s leader of the Tour de France. “I thought it was a terrible idea,” Armstrong told me. “I didn’t think it worked. Seemed like a loser. They were going to give us five million of these bracelets to sell for a dollar. But they also were going to donate a million dollars to kick it off. So I looked at that and went, ‘Sweet. We’ve never had a million-dollar donation. We like that!’ I didn’t know where we were going to store all of these silly yellow bands.”

It was his then girlfriend, rocker Sheryl Crow, whom Armstrong now credits with transforming the bracelets into a national anti-cancer symbol (selling 60 million units and counting). “Sheryl was performing on the Today show and started handing them out to kids and people in the audience outside,” he recalled. “She was so popular that they took off.” (Today, Crow, herself a cancer survivor, wears the yellow.)

Next, Armstrong’s entire team volunteered to wear them in the Tour de Georgia. Then, during the pre–Tour de France trials, Nike sold them at roadside stands. “Suddenly you started seeing fans wearing them,” Armstrong said. “And then [at] the Olympics in Athens … the track-and-field event happened. Hicham El Guerrouj wore one. Soon we had a lot of support in Hollywood. And I don’t know where people got them. I didn’t ask them to wear them. They just got them. You know, little kids see Hillary Duff, and she has a whole arm full of them, and next thing you know teenagers start wearing them.” (That year John Kerry, a prostate-cancer survivor, wore one on the campaign trail. “I appeared at a huge rally in Sioux City, Iowa, in May ’04,” Kerry told me during the Democratic Convention, in Denver, a week after my dinner with Armstrong. “A woman grabbed me in the rope line and told me a tragic story of her sister’s fight against cancer. She handed me a bracelet and I put it on.… It was terrific to remind people that we’re not doing enough on the cancer front. We’re way, way behind. I didn’t care if some Republicans thought it was silly.”)

In 2007 Armstrong and L.A.F. got behind a pivotal state initiative, Proposition 15, under the tagline, “Texas Holds the Cure.” Largely spearheaded by former executive director of the Texas Chamber of Commerce Cathy Bonner (who had watched her close friend, ex-governor Ann Richards, die from esophageal cancer), the bill appropriates up to $3 billion through general-revenue bonds to support the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas—the largest such state investment ever.

The first time I had seriously imagined Armstrong as a politician was last May, when he’d appeared before a Senate committee assessing how America battles cancer. He was as electric as C-span gets. And his message couldn’t have been clearer. This year, 560,000 Americans will die from cancer, he said (close to the human loss suffered in the entire Civil War). The epidemic claims more than 1,500 citizens a day. Put another way, 1.4 million Americans this year will have a doctor tell them, “You have cancer.” More Americans have cancer right now than the populations of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska combined.

As we sat in our terrace chairs overlooking the manicured vista, Armstrong nervously fingered the yellow band on his wrist. He insisted he had something on his mind. “Something huge,” as he put it. I braced for the worst.

Then, in almost robotic fashion, he said, “I’m going back to professional cycling. I’m going to try and win an eighth Tour de France.”

For a moment I gaped at him. Was I being punked? (Armstrong would later tell Doug Ulman, the president and C.E.O. of L.A.F., that my eyes bulged into saucers, like some boinged-out character in a Ralph Steadman illustration.) As the news sank in, though, I realized he was deadly serious. I knew from Armstrong’s memoir, It’s Not About the Bike, that his VO2 max (the gauge by which the human body’s capacity to transport and use oxygen is measured) is superhuman, his ship-sail lungs uncommonly efficient.

But at age 37? A 2,000-mile, 23-day race, much of it uphill? By next July? I asked him, rather ungraciously, if he wasn’t too old to get back into shape that quickly.

He laughed. And he was off and running. “Look at the Olympics. You have a swimmer like Dara Torres. Even in the 50-meter event [freestyle], the 41-year-old mother proved you can do it. The woman who won the marathon [Constantina Tomescu-Dita, of Romania] was 38. Older athletes are performing very well. Ask serious sports physiologists and they’ll tell you age is a wives’ tale. Athletes at 30, 35 mentally get tired. They’ve done their sport for 20, 25 years and they’re like, I’ve had enough. But there’s no evidence to support that when you’re 38 you’re any slower than when you were 32.

“Ultimately, I’m the guy that gets up. I mean, I get up out of bed a little slow. I mean, I’m not going to lie. I mean, my back gets tired quicker than it used to and I get out of bed a little slower than I used to. But when I’m going, when I’m on the bike—I feel just as good as I did before.”

I wasn’t totally buying it. “Are you really 100 percent going to race in the Tour de France?”

“One hundred percent!” he replied. “One hundred percent!”

Over filet-mignon dinner in his library, I realized anew that there is an unhinged directness about Armstrong that is refreshing. No slack, no waste. Just raw essence. He speaks like an old wire-service ticker. And as I listened I gathered that he had two main hurdles in this wild new race—beyond his physical prowess, his age, his health. First, he couldn’t just cruise up to the starting line; he would need the approval of the Amaury Sport Organisation (A.S.O.), the governing body that oversees the Tour. Second, two words would now dominate his vocabulary: “transparency” and “authenticity.” Nobody would be able to call him a “doper” this time around, no matter how circumstantial or bogus the evidence. Like Carlos Sastre, who won the Tour this past July, Armstrong assured me that he would do whatever it took to become a contender—random blood samples and parameter readings—to prove he was a clean rider. In fact, he said, he’d hired a video crew, which was starting to chronicle his journey to the Tour, including his tests, for a possible future documentary.

Every morning, Armstrong explained, he was up at 5:30 training: riding his bike through the Hill Country, lifting weights, sizing up the European competition, jogging for ungodly miles around Lady Bird Lake. He had hired former pro triathlete Peter Park—a Santa Barbara strength and conditioning coach who owns two California gyms—to whip him into shape. His main cycling coach of nearly 20 years, Chris Carmichael, had now picked up the pace. Meanwhile, Johan Bruyneel, his “directeur sportif,” would run and manage his team, developing comprehensive tactics for winning the Tour.

What’s more, he said, this was, first and foremost, about cancer. Whatever personal or athletic demons he was taking on, he would use his return to cycling as a way to spread his message.

By dessert his decision made perfect sense to me. After turning a death sentence into seven yellow jerseys and a national anti-cancer mission, he was cranking it up a notch, to the world stage.

Playing Cassandra, I asked him, pointedly, “What if you fall off your bike?”

He simply flashed me the Look, as Sports Illustrated has called it, a blowtorch stare of cobalt blue. While the Look is meant to unnerve any recipient, which it does, that night it seemed the clearest window into Armstrong’s psyche. Here was the resolve that had beaten back cancer more assuredly than chemo. Here was the piercing glare that turned the tables: you need to be better informed about this disease.

Suddenly, I felt like a philistine for having bare wrists.

Armstrong presents President Bill Clinton with a racing bike and helmet in the Rose Garden of the White House, August 10, 1999. By J. Scott Applewhite/A.P. Photo.

As I drove home after dinner, the clouds in the Austin sky were inflamed by dry lightning. Only a fool, I thought, would doubt Lance Armstrong’s determination to win the Tour de France—arguably sport’s most grueling event—yet again.

Early the next morning I phoned him. I asked him to consider giving me his first “comeback” interview, for Vanity Fair. Perhaps I would even cover the backstory, in book form. On both accounts he seemed cautiously pleased; my guess is that he’d been scheming for this outcome all along. As we talked, I understood the stakes. As the P.R. drumbeat picked up over the coming months, the exposure for LiveStrong, and the sales of those wristbands, would surely balloon.

Unfortunately, Armstrong told me that any interview would have to wait. With a private plane always at his disposal, he was headed to purchase a home in downtown Aspen, his new headquarters as he began training at high altitudes in conditions simulating the Alps and Pyrenees. From Colorado, he would be on to Philadelphia to participate in a LiveStrong Challenge ride and run. But we quickly arranged a follow-up meeting, back in Austin.

When I arrived at his house the next Sunday, however, I encountered a surreal scene out of When We Were Kings—part reality show, part Entourage. I’m still not sure which. Upon entering the compound I was greeted by a small film crew, camera rolling. In cinéma vérité fashion, they were already starting to document Armstrong’s road to the Eiffel Tower, and I had unwittingly become part of the narrative. Joining us for dinner was Team Armstrong: L.A.F.’s Doug Ulman, agent Bill Stapleton, L.A.F. executive Morgan Binswanger, business manager Bart Knaggs, and media consultant Mark McKinnon.

Quite clearly, I’d flown right into the spiderweb. Not that I was too surprised. Earlier that afternoon, while reading up on my neighbor, I’d stumbled upon an old CNN clip, which quoted a top cycling journalist: “Armstrong is wary at the best of times, keeping tabs on everyone who keeps tabs on him. I soon came to find out that reporting on Armstrong meant that he was also reporting on you.” After a few minutes, I bristled and asked the crew to turn off the cameras.

Then I threw a wrench into the works.

“What if you fall off your bike?” I asked, as I had at our dinner, figuring someone had to be the garden-party skunk. “What if you lose?”

A chorus of rattlesnake hisses came my way. It was clear that I wasn’t of their ilk. My naked wrists were noticeable. “I can’t believe you asked that,” said a disappointed Stapleton, deflated. “We don’t go there.”

A cardinal rule of Team Armstrong is never to contemplate failure. When the subject is cancer—Ulman is also a survivor—failure is not an option. Winning is far less important than not losing.

By the end of the evening, however, they had agreed to cooperate with a story. And an eager Armstrong wanted to have me start the very next day.

In the morning, I stopped at the sleek L.A.F. headquarters, near downtown Austin. “We’re looking for a president who’ll provide leadership on the cancer front,” Ulman explained, ladling out strong doses of LiveStrong Kool-Aid. “Twelve months from now, if we’ve done our job, the new president will appoint people to lead this war on cancer. And we’ll be holding them accountable for what they agree to do. We need transformative change. Cancer needs a Cabinet-level position or a cancer czar.”

Having spent the morning at the foundation, I arrived for my 11:00 am interview, chez Armstrong, 18 minutes late. Lance greeted me at the door, slightly miffed. Punctuality is hugely important to him.

As we settled into the library, I asked him whose advice he had sought as he came to his decision. Three weeks before, he said, among the first two people he brought into the loop were the key women in his life: his mother, Linda Armstrong Kelly (who gave birth to him in Plano, Texas, as a 17-year-old single mother), and his ex-wife, Kristin, a devout Catholic. “I definitely tell my mom everything,” Armstrong says. “But my ex-wife is [also] a very important lady to me. She is somebody I’m very close to. When I went to Iraq and Afghanistan to visit the troops last Christmas, I sought her permission. I had her over for dinner and asked her if I could go. She said, ‘I think you can go but, if for any reason in the next three or four weeks I have doubts or I’m uneasy about this, I’m going to tell you and I’d like you not to go.’ And I said, ‘No problem.’ She prayed for me and felt good about it. And same with this comeback. Essentially, I asked her permission.”

I asked whether he’d told his ex-fiancée Sheryl Crow about the Tour yet. He responds with laughter. “Nooo,” he says. “We don’t talk too much.” As a cancer survivor, though, she’ll be excited about the news? “Yeah, yeah,” he sighs. “I don’t know.”

Sheryl Crow and Armstrong arrive at the 2005 Vanity Fair Oscar party at Mortons in West Hollywood, California, February 27. By Luiz Martinez/A.P. Photo.

I quickly realized that with his brutal new regimen, he would have little time for hitting the nightspots or playing the field, two of his most public preoccupations over the past couple of years. He’s recently dated Kate Hudson and Tory Burch, and has been seen out with Ashley Olsen. And from his perspective, even if he’s merely “hanging out with my buddies, hanging out with women, hanging out in clubs,” the press accounts tend to blow up his encounters into steamy affairs.

Basically, he believes his 2006 breakup with Crow—only a few months after they’d announced their engagement—caused a kind of backlash against him as a serial Casanova. “It was a very public split,” he explains. “Then, just a month later, she was diagnosed with cancer. It was a one-two punch. It was a very—I mean very—difficult time, let me tell you. Tricky for me and tricky for her. And they, you know, gave me a hard time. I was living the life of a single guy. And you know people see me with pretty women or stars and they say, ‘What is this guy doing? He’s got an ex-wife and an ex-fiancée who’s been newly diagnosed, and he’s got three children. What the hell’s he thinking?’.… Once [the paparazzi] sniff a little of [you, out on the town], they stay on you. They don’t go away until you go away. So now I’m only going to be seen training, because that is now where I’m at.”

The impetus to come back, he says, sprang upon him quite unexpectedly over the summer, in Colorado. Armstrong had an epiphany on August 9 after placing second at the Leadville Trail 100 Mountain-Bike Race—a 100-mile “Race Across the Sky,” which climbs to more than 14,000 feet. That ascent, cycling upward in a crosscurrent, tripped something primal in him. “It wasn’t a lightbulb going off,” he says, but a realization, combined with a gradual frustration “with the rhetoric coming out of the Tour de France. Not just the Tour on TV but the domestic press, the international press, the pace, the speeds at which participants rode. It’s not a secret. I mean, the pace was slow.

“Then Leadville, this kind of obscure bike race, totally kick-started my engine. For me it’s always been about the process.… The process of getting there is the best part. You start the season a little out of shape, a little heavy. You get in better shape. You lose some weight. I mean you’re just crafting this perfect program. For several weeks I [had] trained [for Leadville] and went riding by myself. Obviously beautiful territory and fresh air, just feeling fit, losing weight, getting strong—living a very healthy lifestyle. I thought, This might be fun to try again.”

Armstrong’s next Station of the Cross was to get the blessing of his L.A.F. colleagues in Austin. If his homeboys thought the Tour was a bad idea, that’d nix it. He laid it out for them this way: A segment of the population considered him an “asterisk athlete.” They believed the charges—never proven—that during his 1999 Tour de France he had used the endurance-boosting hormone EPO. (In 2006, an independent Dutch investigator, appointed by the International Cycling Union, had cleared him of doping during the 1999 Tour, but rumors, especially in France, had still dogged him.) Armstrong vowed to create a comprehensive anti-doping protocol and to undergo one of the most vigorous testings ever devised for an athlete.

Seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong nears the finish line of the Leadville Trail 100 Race Across the Sky, a 100-mile mountain-bike race, in downtown Leadville, Colorado, August 9, 2008. Armstrong finished second, with a time of 6:47:41. Dave Wiens won the race for the sixth consecutive year, with a record-setting 6:45:45. Photograph by Rob O’Dea.

In addition, he promised, “We’re going to be completely transparent and open with the press. This is for the world to see.… And everybody was supportive. Bart—because he’s my best friend—looked at me like, Do you really want to do this? That was the extent of his skepticism. But everybody else was like, Let’s go!”

Behind it all, naturally, was not just a yellow jersey, but that yellow bracelet. He was distressed by America’s halfhearted war on cancer. Under the Bush administration, the annual budgets for the National Institutes of Health (N.I.H.) and the National Cancer Institute (N.C.I.) has gone down. While America spends approximately $12 billion a month in Afghanistan and Iraq, the entire annual N.C.I. budget is about $5 billion. President Bush, in fact, had had the gall to invite Armstrong to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, to go for a ride—it made a good photo op—only to shy away, in Armstrong’s estimation, from ramping up the cancer fight.

Armstrong, though disappointed in the administration, personally likes Bush. “I’ve known President Bush since ’95 or ’96,” he says. “He was governor. My neighbors knew him and we went over there to his office … Very likable guy in person. I mean, politics aside—a lot of people obviously don’t agree with the politics—but, I mean, the guy is decent.”

Armstrong gets somewhat agitated, however, when pushed about whether Bush used him as a patsy. Essentially, Armstrong claims, he was taking a page from the Bono nonprofit playbook: talk to all-powerful people. He shifts the conversation to Bill Clinton. “Look, when President Clinton was in the White House after I won the Tour, I presented him with the yellow jersey and a bike. We had seven minutes, we were told, but I think we stayed about 57. We walked around the Rose Garden, and they have this amazing magnolia tree. Epic. Massive. Huge. And I love magnolias; they’re my favorite tree. And I said that’s an amazing magnolia. And he just stopped in his tracks. He proceeded to give the whole history of the Rose Garden, the White House, everything he could see. It was unbelievable.” The Clinton administration doubled funding to the N.I.H. in the 1990s.

Not pacified by his Clinton spiel, I press him to justify his Crawford bike ride. The Look now kicks in. “Cindy Sheehan [the anti-war activist, whose son, a G.I., had been killed in Iraq] was there [protesting down the road from the ranch], and suddenly it was advertised—publicized—that I was going to ride there,” Armstrong recalls. “We got a lot of calls about my going. ‘How are you going to handle Cindy Sheehan?’ ‘Are you going to tell him to stop the war?’ This was August of ’05. We went to war in ’03. I was in Europe leading up to the war and of course the war was tremendously unpopular in Europe.… I was on the record. I said, ‘Listen, bad idea. We’ve got no business going there. We’ve got a lot of other stuff we need to solve.’ ”

Clearly Armstrong was caught in a Catch-22 situation. If he saw Sheehan in person he didn’t know if he could enter the Crawford compound in good conscience. But around the same time, Sheehan’s mother suffered a stroke, calling Sheehan away from her sit-in. “The anti-war people said, ‘You better stop, otherwise you’re in trouble.’ ” Armstrong recalls. “And the White House basically said, If you do stop then you better keep stopping, stay stopped. But you know what? At the end of the day, he’s the president of the United States of America. He’s the most powerful man in the world, and as a cancer survivor and as a very active advocate you have to go.… And let’s not forget: At the end of the lunch I asked him for a billion dollars. I said, ‘You need to increase the budget at the National Cancer Institute by a billion dollars, right?’ ”

When asked if the president ever ponied up, Armstrong says, matter-of-factly, “I never got it.” As a consolation prize, though, Karl Rove phoned him; it can’t get more depressing than that for a health-care advocate.

For the first time all day, Armstrong leans forward in his armchair, getting worked up. As if crystal-balling, he imagines himself as president, his aides informing him every day that 1,500 Americans have died from the illness. “Imagine if I go to sleep [in the White House] and I wake up the next day and they come in the afternoon and aides say, ‘Another 1,500 died today, sir.’ I can figure that out. That’s a fucking problem! So there’s 1,500 … 1,500 … 1,500 … I mean, after 20, 30, 40 years of that, people start to take that as just part of the deal. And it shouldn’t be.

“If cancer got a whole new name tomorrow and a whole new set of fears associated with it and it had the toll that it does, we would act. Look at all those other things they act upon. Forget war and terror. Look at sars. Remember the bird flu? Remember all that stuff? aids, people freaked. Those were new, scary issues that all of a sudden were going to come jump into your house and ruin your life.

“Obviously,” he says, emphatically, “we need health-care reform in the United States. It’s not a fair system. A third of the society doesn’t have access to decent care. It’s not right.” He then goes on to outline the emergency measures America needs to put into place, sounding positively Ruschaean: “Prevention. Screening. Detection. Survivorship.” But his huge beef—besides governmental lethargy and those pesky tabloids—is tobacco. According to the American Cancer Society, smoking accounts for at least 30 percent of all cancer deaths. “It’s the only product you can buy, and if you follow the instructions, it will kill you,” says Armstrong. “Twenty-four states and D.C. are now smokefree—we’re aiming for all 50.”

Somehow, Armstrong has managed to work into his schedule enough downtime to answer thousands of letters from kids with cancer and leukemia, in a personal, non-form-letter way. “These days I’ve been doing these video messages,” Armstrong told me. “I’ll sit there with a little camera and record a minute-long video and just give a shout-out to them and e-mail it. They love it. They keep it forever, show it to their family and friends.”

The subject swings, inevitably, to the dreaded topic: doping. Another reason Armstrong is entering the Tour is to bury the notion, once and for all, that drugs helped propel him to victory, that his generation of cyclists were deviants. By winning the 2009 Tour, under rigid anti-doping strictures, he believes he’ll forever silence the doubters. “You know, when I first came back, in ’98, ’99, there was a huge revenge factor,” he explains. “I was basically just not wanted by the sport. And was kicked out of the French team because I was cancer sick and so I was angry at people. And I was going to come back and prove that a survivor could do that. There’s a little of that revenge spirit in me now.

“There’s this perception in cycling that this generation is now the cleanest generation we’ve had in decades, if not forever. And the generation that I raced with was the dirty generation. And, granted, I’ll be totally honest with you, the year that I won the Tour, many of the guys that got 2nd through 10th, a lot of them are gone. Out. Caught. Positive Tests. Suspended. Whatever.… And so I can understand why people look at that and go, Well, [they] were caught—and you weren’t? So there is a nice element here where I can come with really a completely comprehensive program and there will be no way to cheat.”

Armstrong recognizes that the European press may very well be laying in wait for him, hoping he’ll fail. “I didn’t go out of my way to make friends with the French media,” he says. “In fact, I was combative. I was unavailable, arrogant, and I was that way to a lot of them. Anybody who wrote a negative article: Done. Never speak to them again. I won’t do that this time. I mean, these daily or weekly [phone conferences]? Everyone’s invited. From the bitterest of rivals I’ve ever had in the pressroom: Get on call. If you’ve got a question, ask it.… They’ll realize that I’m not messing around.” The difference this time, he says, is that he won’t be flaunting his Americanism in their faces. “The constituency that I represent,” he says, “is now cancer survivors.”

Can Armstrong rehabilitate his image with the European press that easily? I was in the Netherlands at the height of the anti-Armstrong frenzy in 2005, and I wonder whether he’s in for a fresh wave of pummeling. They smell the stubborn Texan in Armstrong, and it turns them off as much as the Bush doctrine. “Ultimately,” he says, “the people like who they like and don’t like who they don’t like. They make up their own mind. The papers loved to write that I was the most hated athlete in France, but I’m the guy who rides through that kind of shit. They don’t sit on the bike with me and so, you know, out of 100 people, did you have 10 people throwin’ shit at you, yellin’, ‘Dopé, dopé’? Yeah. But you had 90 goin’, ‘Allez Lance! Allez Lance!’ I can do the math on that. My approval rating is 90 percent. Fuckin’ A. I like that.

“Look,” he insists, “I plan on holding a press conference [saying] I never cheated. I won seven Tour de Frances, fair and square. I’m going back.

Another obstacle Armstrong faces is having his Tour attempt written off as another Brett Favre–ean resurrection. Second—or third or fourth—acts aren’t all that interesting anymore in America. But he insists this is different, since he will get no salary for the 2009 season (although his speaking fees and endorsement deals clearly won’t suffer). “Everybody in cycling has a team and takes a team salary,” he says. “I am essentially racing for free. No salary. No bonus. Nothing on the line.… This one’s on the house. And you know what? At the end of the day, I don’t need money.… Not only will I be fine, my kids will be fine, my grandkids will be fine.”

Money, however, matters to his foundation. And Team Armstrong claims to have recently made a crucial allegiance with the likes of Bill Clinton, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, and several other eminences to be named later, who have plans to announce a global cancer summit, possibly inviting various heads of state to Paris around the time of the Tour. Armstrong insists, “France is an important country, regardless of what people in the red states say—and a good country. So you start there, and obviously you’re at the hub of Europe. And you can have tons of involvement from leaders there [and] why wouldn’t you have the president of the United States there?” And in two weeks, Armstrong will expound on his anti-cancer program at a Clinton Global Initiative forum in New York City.

While it all sounds rather lofty, it’s really the small stuff that Armstrong’s starting to sweat. He has begun a regimen of “epic workouts.” Because he needs curvy mountain roads to train on (Austin only has hills), he’ll be spending a lot of time in the Rockies and Solvang, California, in the coming months. “I’m doing a bunch of core stuff, power stuff in the gym,” he says. “Just constantly changing shit up.” While Armstrong’s exact strategy remains sketchy, he might race in the Amgen Tour of California in February, and the Giro d’Italia in May.

That weekend I watch Armstrong run in the Austin leg of the Nike+ Human Race, held in 25 cities worldwide to benefit L.A.F. and two other charities. The 10-kilometer race in Austin fields about 15,000 runners, who gather at twilight on a summer Sunday. (In 2007, Nike debuted a LiveStrong apparel and footwear line and pledged to donate net profits to the foundation.) Ben Harper performs near the finish line, as thousands of exhausted athletes down Evian, text-message babysitters, talk about grabbing a late dinner at a Whole Foods organic bar. These are Lance’s folks—passionate and fit, singing along to “Diamonds on the Inside.” Optimism is the prevailing vibe.

Armstrong, true to form, seems disappointed he didn’t win the charity race. “I did awful,” he says, crestfallen. “But look at Harper. He’s in great shape. He wrote the best Katrina song, ‘Black Rain.’ I asked him to play it at the end.” Every few minutes, rather healthy-looking women come over to give Armstrong platonic hugs. “I’ve got to get to bed soon,” he says, almost relieved at the concert’s end. “Up tomorrow before dawn.”

I ask him what he misses most now that he’s in monkish training mode. “Salsa and chips,” he says. “That’s it.”

Two days later, I sit in on an Armstrong workout session in his two-and-a-half-car home garage. Even with the garage door open, it’s 100 degrees. The brown indoor-outdoor carpeting makes the setting seem like Wayne’s World. Free weights are all around. Dressed in baggy green Nike shorts, Armstrong, shirtless, runs through a sick set of pull-ups, medicine-ball exercises, and crunches, all executed at a rapid pace. Conversation is clipped with grunts and groans. I notice a scar on his upper chest where the catheter was inserted during cancer surgery.

The White Stripes are playing on the stereo. You can feel that music is a fuel to him. “From Lyle Lovett to Led Zeppelin,” he says of his musical tastes. “When I’m in the garage, I put on satellite radio, like adult alternative. Elvis Costello, great, you can train with that. The next song might be Bob Dylan, great. Next song might be Coldplay, great. Next song might be Foo Fighters, great.… I’ve got 4,000 or 5,000 songs on my iPod.”

Nearby, he has his separate bike garage, where cycles, including kids’ bikes, hang from the wall in all shapes and sizes. There’s also a 1970 black GTO convertible. He has me pick up a Madone 6.9 black cycle, a custom vehicle for riding around New York. “It’s light as a feather,” he says, admiringly, lifting it with ease. “Weighs about 13 or 14 pounds, due to the carbon-fiber fork.”

Team Armstrong says their leader is asymmetrically negative; that is, on a scale of 1 to 10, if Lance wins the Tour de France, he’ll only achieve the status of a two or three. But if he loses, he’ll be a minus 1,000. Worst of all, there is no guarantee that the Tour’s mandarins at the A.S.O. will allow him to race. Plagued by doping dilemmas, rider departures, team withdrawals, and chronic bickering between participants, the A.S.O. has become hyper-selective about who races. If the A.S.O. balks, there’s no telling how low he’ll sink.

High on top of his bookshelves, in special alcoves, are his seven blue Tour trophies. Desperately, he wants an eighth. And if for some strange reason the A.S.O. doesn’t “invite” Armstrong and his team to the Tour de France, he plans on pleading his case directly to the current French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. “I’ve already put a call in to him,” Armstrong says. “Look it up. He’s said strong things about me in the past.”

A couple of hours later, I do look it up. And, sure enough, Sarkozy has praised Lance Armstrong. Back in 2003, while serving as French interior minister, Sarkozy commented on how inspired he was that Armstrong had overcome cancer to repeatedly win the Tour de France. Armstrong’s courage moved him. There are about eight million cancer deaths in the world annually, and Armstrong is leading the way to a new consciousness about the disease. “If we don’t applaud and support him,” Sarkozy once said, “who should we applaud and support?”

“I fear failure,” Armstrong admits, during a quiet moment. “I have a huge phobia around failure. And that’s probably a good thing. The thought of losing this thing—anything—I mean, it could be the Tour, it could be Proposition 15. We’re down at the state capitol [and] these guys are debating it back and forth, amending the bill. The thing looks like it’s gonna die. I mean, the tension was so high. Doug [Ulman] looks at me and goes [whisper voice], ‘Man, this is fun!’ And I said ‘Doug, it is only fun if we win.’ And for me, I think a lot of that stems from just the illness and the diagnosis and the process there. Because failure there is death. Loss there is death. And victory is living. Which people just assume they’re going to do. I mean, most people—cancer survivors—don’t always assume that. But I was scared. You know, from that point on, I associated loss with death. And so I didn’t. It was burned in my mind forever.

“I don’t like to lose in anything. Anything.”

Contributing editor Douglas Brinkley is a professor of history at Rice University.